Abstract

How did the discipline and practice of development communication begin? Who were the founders and how were the first experiments implemented? Rejecting the ideologically populist views that locates development communication origins within western development scholarship, the following postcolonist exposeacute appraises various communication uses in development that emerged from different parts of the world in the past 50 years. The discussion holds that the pioneering development communication experiments were located between postcolonial and underdevelopment theories, and as such, to understand its origins, a study must focus on the earliest non-commissioned and community-originated experiments, as this study purports to do.